It Would Be Wrong to Steal My Sister's Boyfriend (9 page)

“As they used to say to us at school, care to share the joke?” I’d been so lost in thought I hadn’t even noticed that Oliver had turned up at last, was standing next to me, and I must have been grinning away to myself. I told him about Granny and Rose’s toenails, and he laughed. Then he said, “Rose certainly knows how to throw a party. I’m afraid I’m letting her down rather, I’m not much of a mixer really.”

“Nor am I,” I said. “Give me a couple of friends down the pub and I’m perfectly happy, but Rose loves doing things like this.”

Oliver said his worst nightmare was having to entertain clients at work, when you’ve got nothing whatsoever in common with them and you can’t think of a single thing to say and nor can they.

I laughed. “Sounds like hell. Why do you do it?”

“They expect it,” he shrugged. “Schmoozing’s part of the job, even though I don’t think many of us enjoy it much. The guys who have children, especially, hate it when they’ve been in the office since seven and they’re stuck there until eleven and not even doing anything productive.”

I murmured something sympathetic.

“Your friend’s daughter is gorgeous,” Oliver said. “Kids are great at that age – still babies but starting to get really interesting.”

This came as a surprise to me, although I suppose it shouldn’t really – among the people I know it’s generally the men who like babies and the women who don’t. Before she found out she was having Pers, Claire was pretty relaxed about whether she’d ever have a family, and even now she’s told me she finds other people’s kids terribly boring. Rose is positively anti the idea of motherhood too. But Ben and Alex are brilliant with kids, love nothing better than chatting to them and playing peek-a-boo and god knows what else. I wouldn’t have thought Oliver was the paternal type though, and I looked at him with renewed interest, and said so.

“I’d have liked to have settled down in my twenties,” he said, “only I hadn’t met the right person. I thought I had for a while, but I was wrong.” We both looked at Rose in her white basque and stockings, her golden curls beginning to soften and drop down her neck. As always, she was at the centre of a shrieking, braying crowd of her friends.

“D’you think you have now?” I asked.

“Well, it’s early days,” said Oliver, “but I think…”

But before he could finish whatever he was going to say, Rose started rounding everyone up to go on to the roof terrace, from which if it’s a clear night and you’re quite tall and you crane your neck a lot, you get a reasonable view of the fireworks in the South Bank. She came bustling over to Oliver and me with a tray laden with glasses and said, “Would you mind carrying those upstairs, Ollie?” and thrust a couple of bottles at me, and I took them and we all left the flat and filed upstairs.

It was bloody cold up there but the view is amazing, I have to say. You can see the chimneys of Battersea power station sort of looming over everything, and in the distance the glimmering lights of Westminster. There was a thin drizzle falling, not enough to actually count as rain, and I could see little beads of moisture sparkling in the amber light on my
madly teased hair.

Ben and Oliver opened the bottles of champagne and Rose filled up the forest of glasses on the trays, and someone got out their iPhone and found the BBC broadcast, and we all started to count down to midnight. It was pretty cool really – we could hear the tinny sound of the chimes over the phone’s speaker, then a few seconds later the real thing, ringing out faintly but clearly in the still, damp air. And we could just see the first glimmer of fireworks in the distance. Everyone hugged and kissed everyone else – I embraced Claire, warm in her fuzzy jumper, and Pers who was fast asleep on her chest, not in the least fazed by the bangs. I hugged Rose and we grinned at each other for a moment, happy that we were sisters, and for the moment at least, friends. I kissed Ben, who I realised I’d hardly spoken to all night, I even did a ‘mwah, mwah’ air-kissy thing with Vanessa. Then Oliver approached me and I felt all shy and awkward for a second, and we moved together for a polite kiss, the kind you give your sister’s bloke, only somehow it went wrong and our noses bumped together and then I felt his lips against mine, warm and dry and tasting slightly of champagne – or maybe that was the champagne on my own mouth, I don’t know. It only lasted a second but I literally reeled with his closeness. His shoulders felt lean and strong under my hands, and the bit of his hair brushing against my skin felt so silky I longed to twine it around my fingers. Then we pulled away from each other and smiled, and everyone joined hands and bellowed out a tuneless rendition of Auld Lang Syne, and Oliver, who still had my hand in his, asked softly, “So what are your resolutions for this year, Ellie?”

I hadn’t really thought about it in any detail, but I heard my voice say very confidently, “Oh, this is going to be a big year for me. Lots of things are going to change.” And I looked at the last golden glimmer of fireworks beyond the bend in the river, and suddenly I was very sure it would be true.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“I’m hungry,” I said to Ben. “It’s the fifth of January and I’ve been Hank fucking Marvin for five fucking days.”

It was true. Well, not strictly, strictly true – there’d been moments when the hunger had faded, like two spoons into a particularly dreary bowl of tomato soup – but true enough. Of course I’d experienced hunger before in my life, but only in a ‘great, what’s for dinner?’ sort of way. This was an annoying, background hunger that seemed to wipe out the possibility of all rational thought, and I hated it. I’d woken up on New Year’s Day with a bit of a hangover but a deep sense of purpose, told myself that today was the first day of the rest
of my life and all that stuff, and made myself a cup of tea and two pieces of Rose’s organic wholemeal toast, with Marmite but no butter, and when I’d finished it I’d still felt hungry, and that had pretty much set the tone for the year so far.

I sipped my Perrier water morosely and looked at Ben’s pint with an expression that I imagine must appear on the faces of those poor mentally ill women who abduct babies from supermarkets, the moment before they snatch the buggy and leg it.

“I’m doing Weight Watchers,” I said. “Well, kind of. I’m basically eating dry toast and soup and boiled vegetables.”

“That’s not Weight Watchers,” Ben said. “Lucille did that last year and she ate normal food.”

“Yeah, but I can’t have normal food in the house,” I said. “If there’s nice stuff in the fridge, even tofu kind of nice, not family pack of Mars bars nice, I’ll lose the plot and eat it. I’ve no control, I’m scaring myself.”

“What about Rose’s food?” Ben asked.

“Well, she never buys anything interesting apart from smoked salmon, and she gets given boxes of chocolates from grateful clients,” I said. “But I made her do a ritual cleansing of it all before she went off skiing. It’s the scorched earth policy. It worked for Napoleon and hopefully it will work for me.”

“You threw away chocolate?” There was a look of genuine horror on his face. “Ellie, these are bad times.”

“I know,” I said gloomily. “And it was the good stuff too – those salted caramel ball things, and the beautiful swirly-topped ones that look like something from Fabergé, and three giant-sized Toblerones. Although those were mine, obviously, not Rose’s. And we didn’t actually bin them, I took them round to Claire’s – she can be trusted not to eat them all at
once.”

“Hmmm,” said Ben. “It sounds like it’s time for me to stage an intervention.”

“What do you mean?” I said, pushing aside a vision of him turning up with all our friends and them making me trough bars of Galaxy like some sort of feeder orgy.

“If you want to lose weight – not that you need to – you need to do it sensibly,” he said. “I’m not having you giving yourself rickets or something because you’re living off boiled potatoes and frozen peas, which if I know you is what you’re doing.”

“I had tomato soup last night,” I protested. “And Ryvitas with cottage cheese.”

“Whoop de do,” Ben went sarcastically. “Apart from anything else, you need to eat in a way you can sustain, right? And can you see yourself eating tomato soup and fucking Ryvitas every night for the rest of your life?”

“Well, no,” I said. I thought about it for a bit. I suppose you could say I’m lucky, because I’ve never really needed to diet. I’ve always been just kind of normal sized, and apart from my brief and ill-starred foray into veganism a couple of years ago, my weight hasn’t really varied since I went off to university and piled on a stone, the way everyone does. So this was new territory for me, and I imagined that I’d need to go through a few weeks of pain, then I’d be a size ten (even a size eight, in my fonder fantasies) and I could go back to normal, only I’d be magically, permanently thinner and the first step of Project Transform Ellie, as I’d code-named it not very catchily in my head, would be complete.

“You need protein,” Ben lectured. “Protein’s what stops you feeling hungry. And you need food you enjoy, otherwise you’ll turn into a total misery guts. In fact I can see it happening already, and that’s why I’m going to buy you a vodka and slimline tonic before I lecture you some more.”

“Okay,” I said obediently. He went off to the bar and came back with another pint
for himself and a voddie for me, and let me tell you, it was the best thing I’d tasted for a long time. Five days, to be exact. We were in The Duchess, my local pub, which used to be rough as, with gang members knifing one another in the beer garden by way of an evening’s entertainment, but now, like the rest of Battersea, it’s really civilised and has poetry nights and knitting evenings and everything. They’ve done that thing of replacing the flock wallpaper and ancient, sticky carpets with pale-coloured walls and polished floorboards and loads of mismatched furniture and lamps and shelves of dusty old books, which always makes me think there must be a company somewhere making a killing clearing out old people’s houses after they’ve died and flogging the contents to trendy pubs, but anyway it looks really authentic and quite nice. I do miss the old days of overhearing dodgy geezers planning their illegal betting scams and dog fights when you passed them en route to the bar, though. Ben had also got a bowl of olives – you wouldn’t have been able to get olives here in the old days, a wrap of crack would have been about the limit of their bar snacks – and I ate one, then took another.

“Fat,” Ben said.

“What?” I demanded, looking at the olive in horror. It was green, how could it be made of fat?

“Fat is vital in your diet,” Ben said. “It sends satiety signals to the brain, and is important for all sorts of metabolic processes. God, did you not learn anything about nutrition at school?”

I said I supposed I hadn’t, or perhaps I’d been reading
Jane Eyre
under my desk when we had that lesson.

“Anyway,” Ben said, “here’s another thing. Exercise. Look at me.”

Ben sort of waved a hand at himself, and I looked, and as ever it was no hardship.
I don’t think I’ve mentioned it but Ben’s an exercise nut – he’s run marathons and is training for an Iron Man triathlon and consequently he has one of those lean, muscular bodies. Not in a bulgy sort of way, just streamlined, with lovely ridges on his torso and stomach. A lot of the time I don’t really notice Ben’s looks, because… well, I’ve sort of trained myself not to. But sometimes I’m stopped in my tracks by how hot he is – on a totally objective level, of course – and I think how lucky the girl will be who finally falls in love with him, assuming he falls in love back, of course. He was wearing a dark grey suit and a silvery tie and a purple shirt that made his eyes look very blue, and his hair, which is sort of darkish brown, was partly sticking up and partly flopping down.

“Do I deprive myself of food?” he asked.

“No,” I admitted. “In fact you’re constantly bloody hoovering. You’re like a one-man plague of locusts.”

“Exactly,” Ben said, a bit smugly. “That, Ellie, is the magic of exercise. Do enough of it and you can eat absolutely what the hell you like.”

This sounded tempting. I’d sort of assumed there was a different rule for boys, and they could eat like Ben does and not get fat, whereas women have to control every calorie, like Rose does.

“Now,” he said, “we’re going back to yours and stopping at Tesco on the way, and I’m going to cook you a proper meal, and in the morning you’re going to get up and go for a run. Deal?”

I thought about it for a bit. I hate getting up in the mornings almost as much as I hate running. I mean, what are buses for? I did the Race for Life a couple of years ago, but it took me nearly an hour and to be honest I walked almost all of it. I was just there for the good cause and the whole sisterhood thing, really. But I was hungry, and it sounded like a run was
the price I was going to have to pay for Ben’s cooking, which is actually really good.

“Deal,” I said, and finished my drink, and we got up and left the pub.

Ten minutes later the kitchen counter was scattered with vegetables, and Ben was continuing his lecture.

“Butternut squash,” he said. “Hardly any calories, versatile, filling. Cauliflower, ditto. Low-fat coconut milk. Curry paste. Brown rice. In about twenty minutes we will have a dinner as delicious as it’s nutritious.”

“Bloody hell,” I said. “Want to move in? Or you could be like one of those delivery companies Hollywood stars use that drop off your day’s food every morning and I wouldn’t have anything else in the fridge except Evian water and nail varnish, and I’d stay so thin I’d have to bath with a coathanger between my teeth in case I slid down the plughole.”

Ben laughed. “So anyway, Ellie, what’s the aim of this diet mission? I’ve never known you to bother before and like I said, you certainly don’t need to.”

I sat down at the kitchen table and poured a glass of wine, and presented Ben with a sort of edited highlights of the Oliver situation.

“I really, really like him,” I said. “I know he’s going out with Rose at the moment but she’ll find someone else, she always does. She has an unfair advantage, being so beautiful.. And that makes her Oliver’s type, and I’m not. Not yet. So I’m just making a few changes, to place myself a bit more in his sphere of fanciability, if things go wrong with them. You know what I mean.”